Twitter speaks out over DDoS attack

"We are defending against this attack now"

The website was subject to the attack earlier, something it is still recovering from.

Although the service has been down in the past, as this is a DDoS it means that the outage was a malicious one, something that Twitter notes on its blog.

Orchestrated to disrupt

"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack," explains Co-founder Biz Stone.

"Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users.

"We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate."

It's not uncommon for popular sites to suffer from a DDoS. Just last week, the whole of Gawker Media was hit by a similar attack, knocking out the likes of Gizmodo for the good part of a weekend.